Content provided in partnership with
Convention and Chaos in The Turn of the Screw
Hudson Review, The, Winter 2007 by Klein, Marcus
There is nice suggestiveness in the fact that James's source for the story was an anecdote told him one evening in 1895 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson. Prior to his becoming Archbishop, Benson had been a public-school headmaster who was famously zealous for trying to protect boys from bad habits, of which he was aware. He had opposed cubicles and had encouraged flogging. As Archbishop he was engaged particularly in efforts to promote sexual morality in national life, as surely James would have been aware. The telling in itself of the anecdote, this is to say, would have had associations of an illicit sexual sort. In any event, the suspicion of homosexual practices within the public schools was currently widespread, especially as between older boys and younger pretty ones.7 And Miles is both young and pretty.
The governess, however unwittingly, reveals her purpose to possess Miles. She is excited early on by the prospect of dealing "with a boy whose education for the world was all on the point of beginning," but in fact, as she knows from the beginning, Miles's education has already advanced, he is only somewhat virginal. This is to say that Miles offers his own possibilities for narrative exploitation. The governess terrifies him. Unable to leave Bly, as he wishes to do (and as he cannot do because the governess has imprisoned him), he placates the governess and does so, as the climax gathers, in the way not only that she clearly wishes but, to the point, in the way he knows. He flirts. He acts the cavalier. He proffers sexual innuendo.
"You know, my dear," he says to the governess, "that for a fellow to be with a lady always-!" and she reflects, "His 'my dear' was constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity." That "my dear," this is to say, both is and is not here simply a convention of address.
The governess visits Miles's bed at night, at first standing over him with her candle, then moving to sit down on the edge of the bed and taking hold of his hand. "Then you weren't asleep?" she asks, and "What is it . . . that you think of?," to which Miles replies, "What in the world, my dear, but you?" He thinks also, he says, of "this queer business of ours . . . the way you bring me up. And all the rest!" What, asks the governess, does he mean by "all the rest," and he answers, "Oh you know, you know," the while she continues to hold his hand and while their eyes meet, until she throws herself upon him. "Dear little Miles, dear little Miles," she says, and kisses him, and again, "Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you knew how I want to help you"-and he answers appropriately, by blowing out the candle.
On an evening after dinner, Miles plays at the piano for the governess. Again of an evening he comes to sit with her before the fire in the darkened schoolroom; and after two hours, so the governess tells Mrs. Grose, they kissed good night. At the dining table after Mrs. Grose has left with Flora, alone except for the maid, the two are silent, "as silent," so the governess muses, "as some young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter," but Miles is equally attuned. "Well-so we're alone!" he says when the maid finally leaves. "Don't you remember," says the governess, "how I told you, when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there was nothing in the world I wouldn't do for you?," and 'Yes, yes!" Miles says. "Only that, I think, was to get me to do something for youl" What finally he does do, at least prior to submitting to the governess's fatal embrace, is to confess that at school he had "said things" to those he liked, which things it is evident that the governess very much wants to hear for herself.
